


It isn't black and white

by orphan_account



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: AU, Ghouls, Hunters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:13:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23834413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Noah Stilinski never quite forgave the world for his wife's death. And he never quite got over it.So he became a hunter. A dark, fragile human hunter in a world of supernatural predators. They move from town to town, never putting down roots, never allowing himself, or Stiles, to build relationships just in case the creatures of fiction and nightmares ever get wise of what they're up to.Stile's role is to stay on the sidelines. He's the lore guy, the helper, the sidekick. But after so many nights of sticking his father up in the kitchen, and worrying if his Dad will ever come home, he begins to feel like he needs to do something. Like he needs to follow in his Dad's footsteps and fight.
Kudos: 4





	It isn't black and white

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a very different kind of fanfiction for me, one that almost feels like its own story in its own world--but I wrote it with Stiles in mind, so I feel its owed to put it down. It's a sort of discontinued story in my cloud, so depending on how well it's received depends on if I'll keep up with it or not.

The wind’s howl was a meek thing, whistling and shoving its way over the road and through the builings. The moon hovered like a bloated thing in the sky, bleaching the world like an old black-and-white movie. Black asphalt, white snow, black sky, whit e breath. White fear. Black intentions.

_It’s just some kid. That’s all. I shouldn’t be too hard. Not at all._

_I want to go home_. I was lying to myself. Some kid? Really? Just some kid? Since when has anyone care of one of _them_ was just some kid? Since when did being a kid prevent one of _them_ from their deadly business?

 _I’m just some kid—won’t stop me from killing him_.

I hugged my shoulders tighter into my frame, shoving my fists into my hoodie so it would pull downward, the high tightening eerily against the back of my neck. I walked down the sidewalk, keeping my face down, making sure I didn’t step on any cracks. _Step on a crack, break your mama’s back_. Too bad my Mom was dead. Annoyed, I forced myself to look away from my feet. I didn’t want to care if I stepped on any cracks. I looked to the park, instead.

It was deserted this time of night and obviously neglected every other time. In winter it was more of monstrous menace than anything else; snow hadn’t fallen in days so everything on the ground was half-melted and mixed with the gutters and streets to turn an ugly brown. Industrial buildings and old apartments were all closed and shuttered for the night. No one was around. No one but me and a lone figure on a swing inside the park, staring blankly up at the moon. Normal, I suppose, if you ignored the time of night, the weather, and the black-and-whiteness of it all.

 _It’s isolated out here._ There was no one in sight. The apartments were all dark. _That’s what’s important_.

The park looked like was slowly trying to melt and dissolve itself into the snow. The wooden fence surrounding the square plot had fallen, leaving jagged and rotting wood to slant its ways up out of the rolling brown slush. Enough had melted that brown mud was seen, mud that might have been grass sometimes in the 50’s. The merry-go-round in the park was rusted and gave vague screeching sounds as it moved centimeter by centimeter at the pressure of the wind. The swing set the boy was on was the only swing that wasn’t missing chairs and the one he sat on dripped water from its soaking wooden logs.

_You can do this, Stiles You’re badass, terrifying even. You’re prepared for this and you know what to do. Don’t chicken out now. You can kill him. You can._

I walked around towards a section of the fence that had split in two, leaving a walkable gap between wood planks. As my right leg went into the park, I ignored the urge to look back and see if my left foot was on a crack or not. The habit was strong enough that my hips had already rotated into a turn while my feet moved forward. I ended up stumbling into the park. I corrected my balance and shoved my hands back into my pockets. My fingers—which were numb from the cold—clutched the switchblade I’d stuffed in my jacket. I ran my thumb over and over the cold button at the end of the knife hilt, trying to concentrate—to center my mind. I kept feeling the damn lint in my pocket, though, kept feeling the chewed pen-cap that Allison had thrown at me earlier when I bugged him about doing his homework.

Allison would be home right now. Would she notice me gone?

The knife. It was an old and familiar tool and I knew I’d be able to take it out and press the button—having the spring release in a pretty, dazzling ache—and have the stiletto blade out in seconds. I’d stick it right where it needed to go. That simple.

Suddenly I was exhausted. My fingers didn’t want to stay on the button. My feet were getting stuck in the mud and slush of winter. I missed my bed. I missed being warm. I missed Allison and my Dad and I wanted to know if they’d noticed me gone. _Stupid, traitorous body_. I exhaled a cloud of pure white steam from between my lips.

 _I wish Dad were here. He’d know what to do. Of course he would. He wouldn’t hesitate. Never does. If he was here, he could_ —

What? What exactly did I want Dad to do? To give me a pep talk? He would never do that, he wouldn’t even want me out of the house this time of night, much less about to kill Mike. Did I want Dad to want me here? The idea made me a little sick. No, I did not want my Dad to encourage me to kill. I didn’t want him to encourage me at all, really, when it came to his strange, sad lifestyle. I didn’t want him to give me moral support or pointers. I didn’t want his grim stares, his gently said words of fighting wisdom.

Do I want Dad to be here so he can be the one to kill Mike?

Yeah—yeah I guess I did.

I frowned at my traitorous feet. I _could_ walk away. Never come back. The park was old and eerie and I was cold and didn’t want to be here, didn’t want to be doing this. There would be no coming back from a thing like this, no coming back from blood-stained hands. It would change this strange, black-and-white world, stain it with ugly color.

But… but Dolly Saintmark? Jessica Levvet? Did they want their gruesome fate? Did they have the options to run and never come back? Did they even have the grace of knowledge to know what this psychopathic murderer was when he killed them? Probably not. They didn’t have Noah Stilinski as a Dad.

I thumbed the button on the stiletto. I stepped further into the park until I was standing right in front of the boy and his swing.

He looked up at me when I was close enough to see his features under the bleached white light from the moon. His hair was a shade of black, his smile too wide and too bright. He looked like the kind of guy you’d expect to see in your Home-ec class; he looked kind and boyish in his Hollister jacket and a pair of washed out jeans, his hair was in a messy, gelled style. He wasn’t good looking but he wasn’t ugly. The only thing odd or noticeable about him at all was the inconspicuous black marks on his neck where the infection had gotten in. It looked like he could have gotten hickies from an indecisive mouth.

“Hello,” He said. He took me in with his completely normal, black eyes. He tilted his head, not trying to hide the fact that his eyes were tracking me up and down, from sneakers to jeans to hoodie. Those eyes never met mine, though, since he seemed to stop looking up when his gaze reached my chest. Where my heart rested. Where it beat against my ribs.

I centered my balance, standing with my knees slightly bent and my feet parallel, my posture straight. I could feel more core tightening as my breathing turned even. I breathed in through my mouth, out with my nose. “Mike,” I greeted.

“How do you know my name?” He asked, tilting his head and looking unfazed.

 _Oh, hell. Why couldn’t he at least look gross with all the decaying bits of flesh and the ‘eeuuugghhh’ growl that came with drool and a Frankenstein walk?_ He was just too normal. Why couldn’t he just be not-normal? I wanted him to attack me. I wanted him to get this over which. But no, he wanted a damn conversation.

“Because I know you. Or, at least, I know your Master.” _My Dad is hunting him down and killing him right now. Soon, your Master will be dead_. I frowned at his normal face. “I’ve come here to kill you, Mile.” There, that should get him to attack.

But he only sat there. “Why in the world would you want that?” He asked, eyes drifting to my hands in my pockets.

_Because Dad doesn’t think you’ll survive after your Master dies. He doesn’t think a Ghoul can survive off of human flesh alone—without any kind of directions and orders he thinks you’ll crumble away like a puppet without stings. Because I can’t take the chance that Dad is wrong—and I think he is wrong. Because a secret part of me wants to know what it’s like to kill and on the Morality Scale, your death will probably point more North than anyone else I can think of. Because Dolly Saintmark and Jessica Levvet died by your hands. Because you’re reanimated and you desert to Rest In Peace. Because if Heaven is a thing, it doesn’t concern itself with creatures like you and so someone has to take the responsibility of sending you off to your own Damnation._

My thumb was warning the switchblade’s button. “Come on, Mike,” I coaxed, trying to edge the fear away with good old fashioned attitude. It came out flat. I don’t think that mattered to Mike, though, he was a Ghoul and he’d lost his ability to sense emotions when he’d lost his own. “Don’t you want to stop suffering?” I asked, ignoring how the wind was picking up. The ground was cold, the snow was starting to fall for the first time in days, and it was hitting the wind so it fell at a steep angle. The playground around me looked almost… almost innocent. Somehow the sight of its sudden innocence was more sinister than its previous perverseness had been.

 _Black and white, Stiles. Black and white_.

A movement caught my attention. I moved into a more obvious stance as I looked at Mike-the-Ghoul. He was breathing—his chest moving up and down, up and down—at an alarming rate. His eyes were wide and completely human, if you ignored how the black orbs reflected the light coming off the moon like a second glow.

“I…” He breathed, looking very, very confused. His Master must have died because the black marks around his neck were growing, showing the stain of death under his skin. Dad must have finished which meant that I had to get this over with quickly and beat him home. “But when I—when I—”

“When you kill, you feel better.” I said. The books Dad had on occult lore—the paranormal kind, not the human crap people bought and sold next to crystals and bumperstickers—said only how a Ghoul was made and a Ghoul was killed. A Master would need to find the body of a newly dead person and revive them ‘with spirit and blood’, a process which is painful for the Ghoul and creates a very long lasting bond between them. Somehow that bond allows the Master to call forth the essence of the dead-person and make their consciousness come back to life. Things are missing though, things that make a void within the Ghoul’s being and has them craving human flesh. The occult books never talked about a Ghoul dying—or not dying-when the Master was killed. It never talked about a Ghoul possibly needing to kill and eat human flesh out of need rather than instinct, out of a desire to escape pain rather than find pleasure. I was guessing, mostly.

But I’m a really good guesser.

Dad always tells me to focus on the important things, the pattern, the way the Paranormal creature kills. He says not to get caught up in victims and changed humanity and presumed intentions. But he’d also said that a Ghoul would die when their Master was killed.

I looked at Mike. I didn’t have the time I wanted to give a big, heroic speech about the dead women he’d killed being someone’s mother or daughter or lover. But even if I did have the time it would hit dead ears. The speech—that big, heroic, I-am-right-and-you-are-a-monster speech—was more for me than him, anyway.

Mike’s breath spiked, then stopped. His chest didn’t move again and the black hickie was starting to tur into a really nasty looking bruise on his neck. His eyes widened to the point of almost… childishness. He looked like a lost, scared child; almost like a kid who’d learned a big secret and was as excited by it as he was terrified, a strange kind of anxiousness than caused him to panic. When he tilted his head up, his eyes met mine for the first time. His voice was nothing but a whisper when he said, “Yes. I hate the pain.”

He moved faster than I could have counted on. Standing, his chest nearly touched mine and I didn’t even see his hands as he shoved me with enough force that I fell, my ass getting soaked in half-melted snow. I felt a rock on my ass and I tried not to let the world blur as tears gathered. _Stupid, what are you even crying for?_ It didn’t hurt, really. It was mostly shocking.

 _Move_ , I thought. Not my voice but my Dad’s hard, angry bark: _Move your ass, Stiles! Move move move!_

I was moving to stand up just as Mike sat on top of me, knocking my back into the ground as his legs straddled my stomach. His body above me was oh-so-cold, only different from the ground I lay on because of pressure and because he wasn’t wet. I reached into my pocket just above his hips and had my thumb on the button. It was open and I was slashing up at his face before the wetness of the snow started to seep through my clothes. His hand caught mine easily, fingers wrapping around the bones of my wrist and squeezing so hard I almost dropped the blade. He was trying to break my bones with simple, crushing force.

What could I do here? I could try to rock him off of me or I could try to twist my wrist out of his grip. Maybe lean up and go for his face again? I—I was breathing too hard. His face was getting this strange, sick grin on it, like the secret he’d learned only got better and better—twisting him from the inside out as he held onto that great, insurmountable thing he’d learned. I needed to—to—

 _Idiot! Move! Don’t think, don’t rationalize, just move_. Not a memory of Dad’s training. 

My Dad isn’t big on instinct but desired hard evidence and insurmountable tactics. But I didn’t know what to do, here. My body was cold and growing numb, my heart and my breath was coming too fast, my wrist felt like it wasn’t attached to my body anymore except through aching waves of pain.

Dad wasn’t here.

I dug the heels of my boots into the slick ground, trying to find something solid. I grabbed his left wrist and broke in a clean movement; not out of brutal strength but out of precise movements that hand bones _can’t_ make. It wouldn’t be enough to really hurt him but it was enough to distract him. As he howled I shoved my hips upwards. The shock of his broken wrist made him go up rather easily and he was distracted enough that I could bring down my right hand—his crushing grip and all—and slam it into his right upper thigh.

Ghoul blood smells horrible. Their blood and ichor is black, decaying because their hemoglobin is dead and nothing but sludge. It’s like smelling a jar of mayor left out to mold over. Like a barn that has a million cats pissing and shitting inside of it. Something that burns the nose hairs right out.

Though he, as a ghoul, couldn’t feel pain, the shock and fury of the human condition was still in poor Mike. He let go of my wrist and let out an awful, high-pitched scream. It sounded like a siren or a dog-whistle. I didn’t think—

I didn’t see his fist but I felt the impact of it on my face. A thundering sensation in my cheekbone that was duller than the pain in my wrist, less demanding but more debilitating. I reached forward to take out the knife in his thigh—he didn’t even notice—before his fist was connecting with the right side of my face again. His left hand was cradled into his chest at an odd angle, useless. _You can only get hit so many times, Stiles. You’re skull houses your brain and the more someone hits you—the more your brain rattles around. It’s lights out if your brain gets rattled enough to touch your skull. Lights out for a real good time if it starts to swell too much._

Mike was strong on pain and reanimation. I couldn’t even feel my body anymore, just sensations of pain and numbed cold. I probably had two more hits before—

One hit. I was starting to see strange images, like the black and white TV had bad reception and static was starting to come in. It made it very hard to see Mike’s snarling, feral face—his lips pulled back over his teeth, his eyes so wide and excited, his nostrils flaring—and the way he lifted up his right first back towards his shoulder for a good, hard hit. Was he far away or closer? I couldn’t tell. Was I cold or burning up? Really…

My hand was holding something though. A very familiar weight. I knew that. I also knew how to kill a Ghoul. I used all my strength to force the blade up and between Mike’s ribs, ignoring the chest plate and angling it upwards, past ribs and muscles and tissue.

We made contact at the same time. The static won the fight.

* * *

I blinked awake.

Mike was still on me, swaying on his knees, hovering. I was crawling backwards before I could really understand it, my elbows and feet scraping against the snow. I didn’t stop until he was far away and the details of him were indistinct, my back hitting the freezing bar of the merry-go-round.

Mike didn’t notice. It seemed liked he was beyond noticing.

The occult books say Ghouls die two deaths: their first human death and the Final Death. Dad said it wasn’t a Death at all, more like a not-being. I’d never understood what he meant.

Mike was staring down at his chest, where the knife was. He didn’t look confused by it, didn’t look like he had no idea what was going on, instead… his chin was wobbling and dimpling, his eyebrows were pulling inward and upward. It would almost look like he was crying, if he had tears to cry. In a sharp, startling motion he jerked the knife out of his ribcage and threw it away from himself. I watched it fly into the snow a few feet away, past the swing-set.

Mike’s eyes were still on his chest, though, his face crumpled as he touched the fountain of oozing black goo that was slowly leaking out. Just poking at it.

The life seeped from Mike-the-undead-Ghoul’s black, orb-like eyes. Any humanity he had in him disappeared quickly; his skin turned from what to grey, then almost clear-like and waxy. Under his melting skin was his black, shredded up muscles, floating in a river of black blood and yellowing bone marrow. His figure fell into itself as he started to melt from the outside in. Skin disappeared in running rivers, black bone met yellow marrow. In seconds he was nothing but chunks of chair and clothes in a black, disgusting smelling pile. It could have been compost garbage for all I could see of him.

Oddly, I felt fine. Physically. Emotionally. Throwing up seemed like a nice thing to do at the moment, but other than that—fine.

Dad had been right, though. It hadn’t been a death at all. Death meant a body. Meant mourners. Meant something other than a black pile of shit slowly seeping into the snow—as if the melting water knew it didn’t belong—and going away. Mike had already had all that, weeks ago. Now… now he was nothing.

It was sick. Fucking sick that Mike could be reduced to this. What kind of creature was a Master? What kind of individual decided to do this to a seventeen year old boy? To let him awaken empty and soul-less and needing to kill? A Master—

A Master… Dad.

Slowly—realizing that the world was very blurry at the moment—I grabbed my knife and stumbled out of the park.


End file.
